before eleven; it was possible that there was a message or two on my answering machine. Better check it out, I thought, and then call Eberhardt from there before he knocks off for the day.
Taylor Street was only a few blocks from the library, but it took me ten minutes to get there because of the rush-hour traffic. I coaxed the car into a narrow parking space near my building, went inside and looked through the slot in the mailbox. Nothing. The elevator was being cranky again: it made grinding noises and shuddered a lot on the way up. But it determined not to break down and strand me between floors, as it had once for twenty minutes a couple of years ago. I got out of it in a hurry, making a mental note to use the stairs until the landlord got the thing fixed again, and moved down the hall to the office door.
And pulled up short when I got to it.
The door was cracked open about six inches.
The skin along my back prickled; I could feel my stomach muscles begin to wire up. I had locked the door last night-I was always careful about locking it when I left the office because of the kind of neighborhood this was. The building had no janitor, and the only other person with a key would be the landlord; but he was not in the habit of paying uninvited calls on his tenants.
It was quiet in the hall except for the muffled, desultory clacking of a typewriter from one of the offices at the far end. But when I edged closer to the door I could hear another sound-a low pulsing beep, the kind a phone makes when it’s been off the hook for more than thirty seconds. The slit between the door and jamb let me see nothing but darkness and the faint smeary glow from the lights in the building across the street.
I stayed where I was for another ten seconds, listening to the beep from the phone. Then I put the heel of my hand against the panel, held a breath, and gave the door a hard shove and went in across the threshold by one step, reaching out for the light switch on the inside wall.
There was nobody in the room or in the little alcove off of it; I could see that and sense the emptiness as soon as the overhead lights blazed. But what I did see made me recoil, stunned me with an impact that was almost physical.
The office had literally been torn apart.
TWELVE
Wanton, senseless destruction. All the drawers in the filing cabinets standing open and their contents strewn across the floor. The magazines from the table in the visitor’s area ripped apart. The Black Mask poster pulled off the wall and shredded out of its frame. Everything swept off the desk, everything emptied out of the desk drawers. The typewriter still on its stand but the ribbon unwound from the spools like twenty feet of jumbled black intestine. The dregs from the coffee pot splashed on one wall; granules from the jar of instant coffee hurled around over the scattered papers. Jagged slash marks in the padded seat and back of my chair. Worms of white glue squeezed out over part of the desk and part of the client’s chair. A long deep gouge in the desk top, made with a knife or maybe my letter opener. And in the alcove, all the supplies scraped off the shelves, my spare change of clothes cut into strips, and a can of cleanser sprinkled over the tangle on the floor.
I started to shake, looking at all of that. A savage, impotent rage welled up inside me; I had that ugly feeling you get when something like this happens, this kind of personal violation: a combination of pain and hatred and confusion that makes you want to smash something yourself.
The more I looked at the carnage in there, the wilder I felt. In self-defense I caught hold of the door, backed into the corridor, and shut out the sight of it. It was two or three minutes before the shaking stopped and the black haze cleared out of my head. Before I could trust myself to go talk to anybody.
The office across the hall was vacant and had been for weeks; I went back past the elevator, toward the clacking of the typewriter. A guy named Faber who ran a mail-order business had the office adjacent to mine, but there were no lights on inside and the door was locked. The fourth office, where the typewriter sounds were coming from, belonged to a CPA named Hadley. I opened the door and went in there.
Hadley was sitting at one of two desks across the room, hunt-and-pecking on a small portable. He looked up as I entered and gave me one of his smarmy grins. He was a thin bald-headed guy in his forties, with a fox-face and a wise-ass sense of humor.
“Well, if it isn’t the dago private eye,” he said. “How’s the snooping business these days?”
“Knock it off, Hadley. I’m in no mood for bullshit.”
He took a closer look at my face, and the grin wiped away in a hurry. “Hey,” he said, “what’s the matter with you? You look-” He stopped there, but he did not have to say it; we both knew how I looked.
“You see anybody at my office today?”
“No. Why?”
“Hear anything down there?”
“Like what?”
“Like noise. Like a lot of damn noise.”
“I didn’t hear any noise. What-”
“You been here all day?”
“No. I was out from eleven until about two.”
“What about Faber across the hall? He come in today?”
“I don’t think so; he usually doesn’t on Fridays. Listen, what the hell happened?”
“Somebody busted up my office, that’s what happened.”
“Busted it up? You mean vandalized it?”
“That’s what I mean.”
Hadley began to look worried, but not for my sake. “You know who did it?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. You sure you didn’t see anybody or hear anything while you were around?”
“Positive. Busted up your office, huh?” He looked around his own office, as if he were visualizing the same kind of thing happening here. “This building isn’t safe any more,” he said. “Raise the goddamn rent and it isn’t even safe. Maybe we’d better think about moving out.”
“Yeah,” I said, “maybe we’d better.”
I left him and went back along the hall to my door. When I opened it and bent to look at the lock I did not see any fresh scratches or signs of forced entry. But it wasn’t much of a lock; a kid could have picked it with a bubblegum card. I got a tight hold on myself, stepped inside and shut the door behind me.
The destruction was not any easier to look at, but I could face it now without feeling as though I would come unglued. I stood still for a time and asked myself why. For God’s sake, why?
Tenderloin junkie looking for money to buy a fix? Maybe. One of the tenants on the second floor had had his office broken into a few months ago and his petty-cash box looted, and there had been a couple of other break-ins over the years. But never my office, never a detective’s; no money here, even a junkie knew that. Besides, what pawnable items there were, like the typewriter and the answering machine, had not been carried away.
Kids, vandals? More likely. Except that there were none of the vandal’s trademarks: words spray-painted on the walls, puddles of urine or piles of feces. Except that pure vandalism was one of the few crimes that did not happen much in the Tenderloin, and especially not to one office in a building that was locked up at night and full of people during the day.
Somebody looking for something in my files? But I had no information that anyone could want, or at least none I could imagine anyone wanting; just a lot of case-report carbons, most of which were old and nearly all of which were mundane. That sort of thief, looking for something he couldn’t find, might take out his frustration on the office itself-only this was not an act of frustration. It had taken time, a lot of time, to do all this damage. And that made it an act of frenzy, done by somebody with-a sick mind. And whoever had been threatening Christine Webster, who had maybe killed her, had a sick mind; the anonymous letter Lainey Madden had shown me confirmed that. The same person? Possible-and yet it didn’t seem to make much sense. Why come after me? My involvement was minimal enough and I knew even less and posed a far smaller threat than the police. And what would destroying my office accomplish in any case?
Still. The time was right: somebody vandalizes the office while I’m in the middle of two linked murder cases.
